Singapore's Baby Bust: Record low births in 2023 deepen demographic crisis

Someone flagged what I thought was a good comment so I couldn’t respond to it unfortunately.

I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.

The only thing I would add is that the English anthropologist Chris Knight wrote extensively about “sex strikes” (which goes beyond the simple act of sex of course, into the entire structural notion of child rearing as a social function) being the driver of cultural peace throughout human history in his critical 1991 book “blood relations”

Relevant chapter: http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Sex-...

Seems fairly obvious that’s what’s happening and mirrors historical birth rate crashes aligning with general breakup of long running social expectations

Polybius wrote as such in 200BC:

“ In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us.”

Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

https://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/06/11/polybius/amp/

It stands to reason that when a population delays family formation and childrearing, starting years or even decades later than in the past (say... 30+ compared to late teens), there will be dramatically fewer children born. In the case of some couples, no children at all (even if some are desired). If you live in Europe then the population of your country 30 years from now will most likely not look much like you, and the prevailing culture, institutions, and religions will look more like those of newcomers who have higher birth rates, at least for the first couple of generations, and less like those of yours/your-parents.

Malay, Indian, and “Others” do not seem to have this problem.

https://www.ica.gov.sg/docs/default-source/ica/stats/annual-...

Singaporeans work the longest hours in the world, are the most sleep deprived and have the highest rates of depression in Asia. On top of that, an authoritarian regime, a lack of civil liberties, high cost of living and inequality. Maybe the kind of conditions to make people not want to have children?

In the aggregate is the "baby bust" a real problem? Even a halving of current world population, which isn't close to happening in the next 100 years, would only take us back to the population level of 1975. If it's really true that productivity has gone up since 1975, we should be able to maintain the same standard of living as now.

As a corollary, if people are having fewer children with more thought and deliberation, then those children are probably better cared-for. I can't see that as a bad thing.

For those who have no idea what "double-barrelled race" is:

"Couples of inter-ethnic marriages now have the additional option to reflect both their races for their child as a double-barrelled race. This is on top of the existing options of choosing only one of the two different races – either that of the father or the mother – for their child." [1]

Found it via searching it in wikipedia, and even that doesn't define it, only linking to [1] via footnote in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_in_Singapore .

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170729133759/https://www.ica.g...

The article cites the cost of living first and foremost, with the second item being that women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing. I wonder how many countries these would also be the two primary drivers. Or, to phrase the question more in line with what I suspect is the case, I wonder how many countries those two aren't the primary drivers in? I suspect not many.

I wonder how much longer those in power are going to stare this type of data in the face before realizing we need to make some fundamental systemic changes or this whole party is gonna come to a really nasty end. The first thing that goes in an animal population experiencing stress at scale is reproduction.

Not just Singapore, but there is a curious discrepancy in that the cost of children are felt at the family level but the benefits only at the state level. The other issue is that many educated people (including Elon Musk) realize they can have more impact in their careers, maybe even as managers, than in their children’s lives. Maybe the authoritarians of Singapore need to train their citizens to run and extract value from their charges’ lives more effectively. Other extreme ideas which may work for liberal societies include legalizing child employment for family businesses, collective childrearing, organized homeschooling, family intellectual property, and so forth.

I'm so tired of hearing this. Declining birthrates is NOT a crisis. It's a good thing populations are declining. We live in a world of finite resources. There's only so much to go around. A larger population simply means we're less prosperous as individuals.

It's only a crisis to economists who depend on an ever growing population to drive infinite growth.

Singapore, as well as South Korea and in part China and Japan have a few things in common. A work yourself to death culture, paired with the expectation to forever take care of your parents/in-laws.

Not exactly a fertile ground to start a family on. And that doesn't even go into gender expectations.

My take on this is that the current performance culture we've been living since the 80s where we worship the economy over anything else is biting us in the ass. We value work over family and children. We even dare to call them an "opportunity cost".

We should return to a single income society. A modern version of it that is not gendered. A single full-time income should be enough to run the basics of a family. Fail to deliver this and there will be no families. In general we should work less and enjoy life more. Otherwise, what is the point?

The point of technical progress should be less labor needed. But this progress is never paid out because we keep using that room to make up new bullshit jobs to produce garbage products we don't need.

A dutch economist once calculated that about 40-50% of the world economy is bullshit. Busy-keep, non-essential, a replacement for boredom.

Anyway, a system that advocates for dual incomes, job insecurity and high retirement ages that sees children as a distraction to optimal performance will cease to exist. Children are the most valuable "product" in society, yet we care about it the least.

There are many reasons people aren't having kids. Climate change and general meaninglessness come to mind.